Travel

Cuba: it’s still all there – the classic cars, the political posters, the music, the crumbling colonial buildings, the absence of advertising – but it won’t be for long. I would advise booking that trip now, rather than leaving it another year or two. Last month President Obama visited the island following his December 17…

It is Valentine’s day, and for the first time ever, an enormous multi-faith, multiple wedding has been arranged in Mt Abu, Rajasthan. It takes place in a big bowl of dust which is still called ‘The Polo Ground’, but which probably hasn’t seen any polo played since the days of the Raj, when this pretty…

When I was twenty I dropped out of college and travelled alone, overland to India. I didn’t tell my parents where I was until, some months after my disappearance, I sent them - from Mt Abu in Rajasthan - one of those thin blue airmail paper letters. It was 1973 and back then it was…

Reggie Singh, in a blazer, white shirt and old-style cravat, greets us with a billiard cue slung nonchalantly over his shoulder. Traditional Jazz music is blaring out of his huge sound system. “Hello,” he booms in his educated Indian English, “so glad you could make it, would you care for a gin and tonic? Just…

When an American says ‘awesome’, they might mean anything from ‘quite good’ to ‘see you later’. So when I say this trip was awesome, I mean it in the old-fashioned sense of the word; i.e. makes you feel small compared with the wonderful creations of nature. Horizons wider than you’ve ever seen, vast lakes steaming…

It’s a misty, cobalt coloured dusk and I’m out in the middle of the Gangetic plain, a place not normally visited by tourists. From the top deck of the beautiful river cruiser, I look around 360% and, apart from the little yellow light from our pilot boat, which comes through the blue-grey haze like a…